Blue Vengeance (24 page)

 

Little by little, details of the night of Mrs. Flood's death were revealed and became part of a new stream of lore to meander through the streets of Norwood.

The police were involved immediately because of the young age of the victim: she was just thirty-three. Too young to die.

Danny and Janine were not part of the investigation. That's how far out of anyone's consciousness they were regarding the dead woman. Birchdale Betty told the police that she had heard someone running away that night, but she couldn't get any more specific. The cops asked around to no avail.

When they spoke to Miss Hartley she explained about her sister's heart and other health problems, but they waited till they received the autopsy report before they closed the investigation. The final word was:
heart failure stemming from a congenital heart defect; complications from diabetes
.

Danny didn't even know about the police involvement till after it was over.

So it seemed no one in the universe except Danny and Janine knew about the stone that hit the car.

It was a little more difficult for Danny to find out what Mrs. Flood was doing in the school parking lot. No one seemed to be wondering about that but him. So he enlisted Morven again, and again she came through. She spoke to one of the girls on the basketball team and found out that Mrs. Flood was standing in as coach. Miss Hartley had left the school at 4:00 for a dental appointment that she had already postponed twice. It wasn't an important game, as games go, so she'd asked her sister to cover for her.

Danny thought it odd that a history teacher would fill in as a basketball coach and said as much to Morven. It didn't matter; it just seemed odd. So Morven sought out the girl again and discovered that Mrs. Flood had once been a physical education teacher before her health took a turn for the worse. That was when she switched to history. Apparently she
knew her stuff
when it came to basketball. That's the way Morven put it.

She seemed so happy to be doing Danny's bidding (he hadn't even specifically asked for this last piece of information) that he wished he had further assignments for her.

He wondered if Mrs. Flood had known she was going to die soon, and that that was at least part of the reason she had carried on with an eighteen-year-old greaser. Maybe she felt she had no reason to be cautious anymore, no reason not to act on every whim.

And he wondered what Miss Hartley thought of the affair — if it grossed her out, if she tried to talk her sister out of it. Maybe she hadn't even known.

 

When Danny got home from school on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, a little over a week after Mrs. Flood's death, his mother was standing in the living room staring at the couch. It was cloth-upholstered and it used to be decent enough with its quiet earth tones, but she had ruined it with her constant dead weight and with spillage and with tearing at errant threads till they came loose and started a process of unravelling. He saw spots that were almost bare.

“It's a mess,” she said.

“Yup.” There was no getting around it.

When he got home from school on Thursday all the removable cushions were in the front yard. Inside he found his mother trying to drag the couch out from the wall.

“We're getting rid of it,” she said. “There's a new one coming from Eaton's. I ordered it from the catalogue.”

“Won't the Eaton's guys move it?”

“I can't wait that long.”

“Here, let me give you a hand then.”

He had his doubts about managing it, but then the doorbell rang, and two men from Eaton's announced themselves.

“I think out the front way would be best,” said Barbara. “Fewer twists and turns.”

They struggled in the doorway, cheerfully chipping paint here and there.

“Right to the curb, please.” There was a lilt in her voice. “Fix the cushions on it, will you, Danny? I've phoned the Goodwill. It's a good solid couch for someone.”

The men settled the new one, drank a glass of water apiece, and drove away.

“Do we have a tarpaulin?” Barbara glanced at the sky. “It looks like rain.”

All Danny saw was blue sky, except for a narrow line of cloud in the southwest, across the river.

“Those clouds are coming this way,” said his mum.

How did she know that? Couldn't they just as easily have moved off in the other direction? Plus there was no wind. She had always been good at weather.

As he went to fetch a tarp from the shed, his mother called after him, “Oh, Danny, I meant to tell you, a man was here from Children's Aid.”

His stomach disappeared. “What did he want?”

“He wanted to know if someone named Janine Sénécal was staying here.”

“Who?”

“Janine Sénécal.”

He still hadn't gotten around to figuring out her last name after realizing it was too late to ask her without sounding like an idiot.

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I didn't know anyone by that name.”

It was true.

She left it at that. There were some good things about his mother.

He didn't want to think about Janine so he hopped on his bike and pedalled over to Wade's for a chocolate milkshake. As he poured the last bit from the silver container into his glass his eyes drifted over to a display of cards at the end of the counter. He picked one that said
With Sympathy
on the front and paid for it along with his milkshake.

When he got home he sat down for supper with his mum. She had made Scotch broth soup and toast, and he couldn't disappoint her by telling her he was full.

Afterwards he went up to his room and sat with the card a while before writing
Please accept my condolences
on the inside with his name underneath. He slipped it into its envelope, rode over to rue Valade, and put it in Miss Hartley's mailbox, not caring if she saw him. If she felt anything like the way he had felt in the weeks after Cookie's death she was sitting in a chair staring out a window at nothing.

He went to the parking area by the back lane and looked at the green Beetle up close. Sure enough, where the roof curved to meet the driver's door there was a tiny chip of paint missing.

 

On a sunny day in mid-November, after the first snowfall that stayed, Danny walked down the lane to Janine's house. He squinted against the blinding white of the snow, and Russell frolicked as if she were still a pup. She never remembered from one winter to the next how great it was.

He heard the scrape of a shovel. Before he even saw the boy he knew that they were gone. He hadn't seen her at school, and neither of them had sought the other out.

The youngster was pushing snow off the stoop where the two of them used to sit. Danny had never seen it in winter before. A woman opened the back door.

“Good job, Billy.”

Danny started to move on and then changed his mind.

“Can I help you?” said the woman.

“No,” he said. “It's all right. I knew the people who used to live here. I thought they might still be around.”

“Nope,” said the boy.

“They're not long gone,” said the woman. “We've been here less than a month.”

“Do you know where they went?”

“No, sorry, dear. I just know they left in a hurry.”

“Okay, thanks.”

A cat appeared from around the side of the house.

“Pearl?” Danny said.

“Do you know her?” said the woman.

“Yes, I do.”

“Her name is Pearl?”

“Yes.”

“The rental agent said they couldn't take her, so we offered to let her stay on. She's no trouble. In fact, she's a good mouser.”

“'Kay, good,” he said.

Pearl came towards him, and he crouched down and held out his hand. She looked at him steadily as he scratched under her chin. He imagined that she was saying,
Where are they, Danny, where did they go
?

 

Danny and Barbara wound through the quiet Sunday streets in the old DeSoto. It was her idea. They were going to see Cookie's grave.

The headstone no longer seemed important. He'd let his mother have her way. It was the only thing he could think of to give her: the opposite of going against her.

They parked and walked the short distance through freshly fallen snow. Barbara used a cane. It took him a moment or two to register what he was looking at. It was a different stone, one of a lighter hue. And on it were the words:
Cookie Ruby Blue
. All the other information was the same, but
Cordelia
was gone.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

“I'm sorry, Danny.”

There it was again.

“You don't have to keep saying you're sorry.”

“Don't I?”

“No. Once was lots.”

“But there are so many things…”

Yes, there are
. “It's okay,” he said.

“Danny?”

“Yes?”

“About your dad?”

“Yes?”

“There are some things...that I can't explain. It's not that I don't want to. I just can't. If I ever I find that I can...”

The words he wanted from her weren't present in her world. Maybe they never would be. There was nothing he could do about that.

“I'm pretty sure I saw him,” Danny said. “My dad, I mean.”

He told her about the powder-blue Cadillac and how the man had stood by James's grave on his birthday, on their birthday. And he told her that he knew he'd been there the day they buried Cookie.

“I want to meet him, Mum.”

“We'll see,” she said.

“May we please move James over so he lies beside Cookie?” Danny said.

“Yes,” said Barbara. “We'll see about that too.”

 

The winter of '64–'65 was cloudier than usual — darker — but maybe Danny just saw it that way. The light seemed to fall in a different way on the hockey rink, on the toboggan hill — more aslant somehow.

Paul drifted back into his life. When Danny looked back he couldn't remember the details of how that happened. He did remember that neither of them spoke at all of the past spring, summer, or fall.

He thought about looking for Janine, but never as more than an idea. There was barely a starting point. He was certain the Children's Aid Society had everything to do with their vanishing, but he thought he knew Jake and Janine well enough to know that if they were running, they wouldn't be found. And even if he did find her, what would he have to tell her, to ask of her?

Besides, his dreams of her were at the little house on Lyndale and on the streets of Norwood where they had walked and planned and fought. And at the river. That was where he wanted to see her, not somewhere else.

 

The scent of lilac and lily-of-the-valley fills the air on a warm Saturday in spring of 2006. After his daily visit to his father at the Riverview Health Centre Daniel walks downtown from his home in the Norwood Flats. Outside Into the Music on McDermot Avenue he leans down to pat a Jack Russell terrier. It doesn't look to have any other breeds in it, unlike his long-ago Russell, the best dog he ever had. This dog licks his hand. Daniel lets it.

“She'll lick your hand all day if you let her.” It's a woman's voice.

When he looks into her face he sees someone about his own age. Her lines are cut deep.

“Danny?”

“Yes.”

“You don't know me.”

And then he does. It's the voice. There is still the tiniest trace of a French accent combined now with something new, from a new place, perhaps. And then, when he tries harder, he sees her inside the weathered skin.

“Janine.”

“You got tall,” she says.

They don't embrace. There's a remnant left from all those years ago that precludes hugging.

“Let's get a drink,” she says.

They sit outside at the King's Head so there is a place for her dog.

Daniel goes inside for the drinks: a pint for her, a half for him. The pub is almost empty. It's not quite lunchtime. At the outside tables a few young people are scattered, beautiful in their youth, in spite of their piercings and black hair and ubiquitous tattoos.

“What's her name?” Daniel says when they're settled. “Your dog, I mean.”

“Jack.” The dog looks up at her, and she smiles.

Her smile is the same as it was, with its downward edges. It reminds him that he never got to kiss her.

“It was either Jack or Russell,” she says, “so we opted for Jack.”

That is about as close as they get to the summer of '64.

It's there, like a presence at the table, but they don't talk about any of it.

“We?” he says.

“Me and my dad. When I came up to visit him a few years ago we decided to get him a dog to keep him company.”

“Is he…?”

“No. He died on Monday. I've been here for a month or so. Lung cancer finally got him, but he smoked for over sixty years before it did.”

She chuckles. “He never even tried to give it up.”

Daniel pictures Jake in his undershirt, the filterless cigarette permanently attached to his lip, squinting at them from behind the screen door.

“What about you?” she says.

“My mum died a long time ago,” says Daniel. “But not before she got me in touch with my dad. He's still alive. I see him almost every day.”

“That's good,” said Janine. “How about Aunt Dot?”

Another tap on the shoulder of 1964.

“She's long gone.” Daniel smiled. “Good old Aunt Dot.”

There are more catch-up words, nutshell words. Janine lived most of her life in Austin, Texas. She married a musician down there, then another, and then yet another. The last marriage took. Stephen is her husband's name, and he still plays gigs around the Austin area.

“I sewed mainly,” she says. “Waited tables and sewed. I still sew for certain people, special clothes you know, mostly for bands, musicians.”

“
Seamstress for the band
,” says Daniel, and they smile, both knowing the lyric from the old song.

“Kids?” he says.

“No, no kids.”

A little gust of wind blows through and lifts her white hair off her forehead. She is one of those people with the right skin tone for white hair. She looks just fine.

“The time never seemed right,” she says. Lights a cigarette and coughs. “What about you?”

Daniel is married to a woman named Marsha, and they have three kids: two girls, Jean and Lara, and a boy, James, all grown. Lara is expecting a baby, his first grandchild. He has had a long career as an engineer, a builder of bridges. He's still working. Marsha taught home economics at Nelson Mac for many years after the kids were in school, but is retired now. She grows her own vegetables; she's a fine cook.

“Maybe a little too fine,” he says and grins, in reference to the way he has filled out over the years.

“You look good,” says Janine.

He doesn't tell her that people call him Daniel now because he wants to hear her say his old name again.

Please say it
.

Does she know that Rock Sand died in a car crash before he was out of his teens, or that Birchdale Betty went to jail for extorting large sums of money from elderly widows?

He wants to ask her where they went that fall, she and her dad, and why. He decides it would be prying.

She looks into his eyes and says nothing.

As lives go, they knew each other for a very short time. Wrong as it had been — what they planned, what they did and didn't do — Daniel had believed that for a few moments in time they'd been on the same wavelength, on the same live wire. It had been something, really something. For him.

He feels a movement underneath the table and looks down to see Jack settling her chin next to his sandalled foot.

When Janine goes inside for more beer, Daniel speaks to the dog.

“I loved her once, Jack,” he says. “My, how I loved her. But she let me down, man. She truly let me down.”